Just One of Those Days
by aces
Summary: Stargate SG-1 vs. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…SG-1, you’re screwed.


Title: Just One of Those Days  
  
Author: aces  
  
Summary: Stargate SG-1 vs. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…SG-1, you're screwed.  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Warnings: Language. Gratuitous exaggerations, caricatures, and severe Danny-whumping in the form of allergies and ponds. Don't ask, just read.  
  
Disclaimers: I'm borrowing. I'm blatantly and outright stealing from Douglas Adams's writing style, not to mentioning sneaking off with a character or two of his, not to mention making off with the whole of SG-1 and General Hammond, but I'm putting them back in the end. Only slightly broken. And in most cases, you won't even notice the dents.  
  
Notes: Thanks to Lisafer, who gave me Sam's hair and loved Teal'c's smugness. There's perhaps more of SG-1 than the Hitchhikers (yes, I wrote a HHGTTG story without Arthur Dent, but you will survive), but…well, you'll see. *sunny smile*  
  
JUST ONE OF THOSE DAYS...  
  
"Who is it?" General George Hammond didn't bother with the formalities as he hurried into the control room, staring down over the sergeant's shoulder at the computer screen. He saw the SG-1 code flash up. "Open the iris!" he yelled in his best commanding tones, privately wondering what the hell the team was doing back already. They'd been scheduled for a normal three-day survey on a currently uninhabited planet; they'd just left yesterday afternoon. He really should have been used to them running headlong into the unexpected and having to change their plans, however.  
  
Four figures staggered through the wall of plasticky water. Hammond stared. "Close the iris!" Colonel O'Neill shouted with rather unnecessary force. Sgt. Davis did as ordered without waiting for Hammond's permission. The general didn't mind. He was trying to decide if any of his premiere team was actually injured or not. They just looked highly...aggravated.  
  
He headed down the stairs and entered the embarkation room proper. As he made his way through the doors, he heard the strangest, most startling sound he'd ever heard in that room. He noticed the guards looking around in bewilderment, this threat to their ears even making some of them reach instinctively for their guns.  
  
Jack O'Neill was staring accusingly at Daniel Jackson. Daniel Jackson was glaring back. And then he sniffled again. It sounded like a 1978 Pinto stubbornly refusing to start. Hammond had never thought it possible for a human to make a sound like that. He dragged his attention back to Jack and said, "Colonel?" as if actually expecting an explanation for what was going on.  
  
Jack was breathing heavily, and for some reason, George expected smoke to be coming from the colonel's ears. Captain Sam Carter didn't look to be in much better spirits; she seemed to be vibrating gently with suppressed irritation on an order the likes of which Hammond had rarely seen outside the criminally insane. Only Teal'c seemed to be in anything approaching a civilized mood. In fact, he appeared to be inordinately pleased about something.  
  
Curioser and curioser, the thought gently suggested itself in the back of George's mind before making a discreet exit. Ignoring it, he continued to stare expectantly at O'Neill.  
  
"Sir, I recommend we delete that address entirely from the base computers," Jack said raggedly. Daniel sniffled agreement and then looked slightly ill. Carter nodded so fiercely her hair made a valiant attempt to fall into her eyes but failed. Perhaps it was too scared of getting in her line of sight. Teal'c smirked.  
  
Hammond looked from one to the next of the four team members and realized he wasn't going to get anything reasonable anytime soon. It was only then that he noticed that Daniel Jackson was...very damp. And smelling decidedly of alien swamp. At the moment that wasn't even worth a raised eyebrow. "Head to the showers, SG-1," he said wearily, "and get checked out by Dr. Fraiser. Debriefing in three hours."  
  
He watched the four team members alternately stalk, trudge, march, and glide out of the room and shook his head. Just once, he mused to himself, just *once* he'd like that team to have a *normal* mission.  
  
***  
  
"The mission started out fine, sir," O'Neill said. The four team members had washed--Jackson still had tangled wet hair--changed their clothes, and seen Dr Fraiser. Carter, Teal'c, and Daniel were all sitting quietly at the briefing room table, though the linguist did have a conspicuous packet of tissues within easy reach. Jack, however, was pacing around the room, the nervous energy irradiating from him making Hammond want to snap at the airman to siddown. He managed to contain himself.  
  
"That's nice to hear, Colonel," Hammond said patiently, looking at the other three. Sam shrugged, looking both helpless and still residually annoyed. Daniel was too busy blowing his nose to meet the general's eye. Teal'c was still smirking. It was a fairly unnerving sight, actually, now that George considered it properly. The Jaffa simply hadn't had enough practice in grinning to make it look anything less than creepy. But he was certainly getting enough practice now, so perhaps in time it'd start to look a little less menacing. And that was entirely beside the point of this briefing. Hammond turned back to the colonel, hoping somehow to get the younger man to sit *down*. "What then brought your team back so early? You were supposed to be on that planet another day and a half at least."  
  
O'Neill finally stopped moving, pivoting around to look at the general. "We met some...people," he said and stopped with a troubled frown.  
  
"People?" Hammond repeated with raised eyebrows.  
  
"People," Daniel confirmed, finally emerging from his Kleenex. He looked down at it, stared, crumpled it, stared for another moment, and then fumbled as he set it down on the table, trying to hide it from view behind the packet, unsure what else to do with it. He seemed embarrassed. Apparently he'd forgotten he had a breast pocket on his black t-shirt.  
  
"And there was something unusual about these...people?" Hammond encouraged, returning his attention to Colonel O'Neill, hoping, praying, wishing to get a straight answer out of this team. Once. Just once.  
  
"You could say that again," Sam snorted. George looked at her. "Sir," she added quickly, looking unsettled.  
  
"Did they shoot at you?"  
  
"If only they had," Jack muttered, stalking up to the table and grabbing his usual seat next to Daniel. George repressed a sigh of relief. "They were insane. Sir."  
  
Hammond blinked. "Insane."  
  
"Insane," Daniel agreed nasally. His nose was looking ever-so-slightly red. Jack peered at him for an instant, shook his head, and turned back to the general.  
  
George resisted the urge to drop his head into his hands and sigh. He turned to Teal'c with one last bit of hope--perhaps the Jaffa could give him a useful answer.  
  
"What have you to say about these--people--Teal'c?"  
  
Teal'c turned his head slowly to gaze at the general. A strange smile floated across the man's dark face. "I found them quite entertaining, General Hammond," he stated serenely.  
  
"You would," the other three team members retorted in eerie unison. They glanced at each other, then turned quickly away to look out the window, at the general, through the door, anywhere else.  
  
George closed his eyes and counted to five. He had a feeling if he'd tried for ten he would have been up and leaving the room by the time he reached seven. "Alright, people," he said with a deep sigh. "Why don't we begin at the beginning?"  
  
***  
  
The mission really had started out quite enjoyably. Not exactly normally, since this was SG-1 and a normal mission for them involved large guns, bigger explosions, and some type of cell waiting for at least one or two members of the team while the other team members tried to break them out of said cell, but it had certainly been fairly pleasant. Jack hadn't even minded all the trees so much. At least they weren't the local equivalent to evergreens for once, instead tropical-like plants of various colour, though mainly sticking to nice, safe, normal green (Jack tended to get a bit weirded out by planets with virulently pink foliage).  
  
They'd been making the short trek to some ruins a couple hundred kilometers from the gate. The sun was shining, there was a gentle breeze, and everyone was in a good mood. Sam was collecting the odd bit of plant life to take back for analysis, Teal'c was stopping to smell the occasional flower, Daniel was off in some ancient world of his own that probably involved at least three different languages, and Jack was humming to himself, but even that was only mildly irritating to everyone else.  
  
"Carter," Jack said presently. "May I ask you something?"  
  
Sam frowned in puzzlement. When the colonel decided to ask something of his own volition, apropos of nothing, it could only mean trouble of some kind or another. Usually mental trouble, as she tried to follow his thought processes. And he complained about *her* thinking. "Of course, sir," she said as neutrally as possible. There was a distant rustling of undergrowth, but only Teal'c paused to listen, and he decided it was something that belonged to the planet. None of his instincts were telling him something was out of place.  
  
"If you're supposed to be an astrophysicist, why do you always go around collecting plant samples?"  
  
Daniel seemed to wake up at that, glancing between the colonel and the captain. Teal'c looked around, also looking at his team members in mild interest, judging by the negligent half-raising of eyebrow.  
  
"Because, sir, these samples could contain something useful and/or interesting that we don't have on Earth," she replied readily. "Besides which...I'm the only hard sciences person on the team." Chief bottle-washer, she didn't add aloud. She had a feeling the colonel wouldn't get the joke.  
  
"Right," Jack said, looking as if he were about to drag this conversation down into something deeper, more convoluted, and just nowhere that Sam wanted to go right then. It was at that point that something crashed through the undergrowth. The captain was almost grateful for the distraction.  
  
"Everyone get down!" Jack instantly hollered, automatically reaching for and grabbing Daniel's shoulder and pushing him down, accidentally landing Daniel in a large green, rubbery shrub. Carter and Teal'c were already hunched down, gun and staff weapon at the ready.  
  
Two seconds later, two people appeared.  
  
"Woooaaah," one of the people said, holding up two of its three hands. "Woah woah woah. No need for all the firepower gentlemen--"  
  
"And lady," added his other head as it swiveled around to catch sight of Carter. His first head followed the other head's direction.  
  
"Hello," the first head grinned appreciatively. He appeared to think the grin was sexy, charming, debonair, classy in that Cary Grant kind of way. "Lovely to meet you, almost as lovely as it is to meet me, I'm sure."  
  
"Carter?" Jack muttered.  
  
"I don't know sir," she replied through what sounded like gritted teeth. "But if he keeps smiling at me like that can I shoot him?"  
  
"Let's not jump to conclusions here," Jack cautioned her, surprised that he was the one who had to do the cautioning. "Daniel?"  
  
"Hi," Daniel said, standing up, hands held up in front of him in a gesture that could be loosely interpreted the Universe over for, 'Hey, how's it going, don't shoot me, I'm friendly and I promise not to get anywhere near your daughter.' "Uh...do you come from this planet?"  
  
The other man--who had until now merely looked silently and warily between the four team members--began laughing. "D'you really think we'd come from this planet?" he snorted. He had only the one head and two arms and appeared quite normal at that, if dressed oddly in a blazer and slacks from one of the more sartorially obtuse decades of the twentieth century. "There can't be a good party here for miles!"  
  
Daniel blinked. He paused. He opened his mouth, reconsidered, and closed it again. He glanced over his shoulder at Jack, who merely shrugged unhelpfully. He turned back to the two men in front of him and finally said, "I'm Daniel Jackson. That's Jack behind me, and Sam, and Teal'c. And you are...?"  
  
"Zaphod Beeblebrox, baby," the man with two heads and three arms said, turning his sexy, charming, classy, Cary Grant smile on Daniel. Daniel could see why Sam had ideas about using her gun. "Don't you recognize me? Or did the third arm fool you? I have had it a while you know."  
  
Daniel blinked repeatedly. "Riiight..."  
  
"I'm Ford Prefect," the other man said. "Where are you lot from anyway? And could you give us a lift off here? We appear to have...misplaced our spaceship."  
  
"We're from Earth," Jack said, standing up and lowering his gun. He motioned for his other team members to do the same. They might be weird, and they were probably going to turn out to be annoying, but the two strangers weren't setting off any danger alarms, and Jack trusted his instincts. "And we don't have a spaceship. We came through the Gate."  
  
"Earth?" Ford repeated, and he actually blinked. He had wide blue eyes that rarely blinked, the team suddenly realized as he finally got around to doing just that. "I spent fifteen years there. Interesting planet. Strange. Went to some great parties. So you're an astrophysicist then?" he turned to Carter with a bright smile.  
  
***  
  
Carter appeared to be chewing on the inside of both her cheeks. It looked quite painful, but her irritation seemed to override any pain she might be feeling. O'Neill gave her a concerned look out of the corner of his eyes before returning his attention to the general. "So we started walking toward the ruins again, the two new guys in tow..."  
  
"You allowed them to come with you?" Hammond asked in surprise.  
  
"We couldn't stop them," Daniel replied, the words bursting out of him of their own volition without any permission from his brain. He waved his hands frantically and extravagantly. "They--"  
  
"Clung," both he and Jack finished at the same time. "Sir," Jack added after thinking about it.  
  
"So there we were, marching along again, and these two would *not* shut up. The one guy—Ford—kept making fun of Carter's choice of profession..." Jack ducked a nervous look at his second in command again out of the corner of his eye and hurried on, "and the other guy, Zephyr..."  
  
"Zaphod," Daniel supplied automatically.  
  
"Yeah, whatever...he kept trying to hit on Carter."  
  
Hammond blinked. He didn't need to look at the captain to feel the aggravation rolling off her in waves; given half a chance, it might have gone off through the gate by itself to knock off a Goa'uld or two and then take out some other baddies for an encore using its bare hands--if aggravation could be said to have hands. He was tempted to ask if both strangers had still been alive on the planet by the time SG-1 left, but decided that if he did that, SG-1 would only get distracted and he'd never get a full report. "Did you make it to the ruins?"  
  
"Oh yeah; that was no problem," Jack assured him, glancing now at Daniel. The look on the colonel's face was long-suffering. "But that was when things started to get *really* interesting..."  
  
***  
  
"Uh-oh," Daniel said.  
  
"What-oh?" Jack replied sharply, looking around. They'd just walked through a hole in a crumbling stone wall, and he found the 'ruins'--they certainly were that--creeped him out. There were bits of stone everywhere, heaps that had obviously once been buildings, but none with roofs left, and everything was being overgrown by green and brown plant life. Daniel found it rather beautiful. Jack felt like he was in a bad horror movie where the plant life was gonna start slithering over his legs and pull him down some rabbit hole where things would only get more ludicrous. He was tense anyway; after all, it wasn't often he had to restrain *Carter* from killing someone.  
  
"Wuh-oh," Daniel said again. There was a peculiarly introspective look on his face.  
  
"*What?!*" Jack yelled, swinging around in a full circle, searching wildly for some kind of threat. All he saw was Carter glaring murderously at the sublimely unaware Zaphod Beeblebrox and the still-manically-grinning Ford Prefect. And Teal'c, who strangely seemed to be attempting to hide a grin of his own. From the first, the two aliens had left Teal'c strictly alone, perhaps recognizing some kind of kindred spirit of alienness. Or maybe it was simply because he was big enough to take on both of them at the same time without even raising an eyebrow.  
  
Daniel sneezed.  
  
Beeblebrox stepped back slightly, a look of distaste crossing one face. The other head was dozing lightly and didn't bother waking up. "Watch where you point that thing," the awake head said. "I just had this suit cleaned, and it's not like there's a Laundro-Matic in this star system, you know."  
  
Jack scowled, not quite able to relax. "Dammit, Daniel, where's your antihistamine?" he barked, taking another, slower look around the immediate area. No threats. Though he was seriously considering taking the captain's gun away from her. Ford was currently saying something about "having had their sums all wrong for decades now," and Carter's breathing was getting increasingly ragged. Jack knew she would've been able to handle them one at a time, really she would. But two at once would be enough to try anyone's patience.  
  
"Oh no," Daniel said.  
  
"Now what?" Jack groaned and turned back to the archaeologist.  
  
Daniel had been looking through his jacket and pants pockets. He'd then taken off his pack and knelt down to search through that. He now looked up at Jack worriedly and absently sneezed, wiping his nose on his jacket sleeve. "Uh...I think I forgot my pills at home," he said. He looked down at his pack again. "Oh dear..."  
  
Jack let out a slow, deep breath. And then another one, because the first slow, deep breath was demanding company. "Okay," he said. "D'you at least have Kleenexes?"  
  
Daniel held up a small packet of tissues without looking at the colonel, one hand still digging ineffectually through his pack.  
  
"Okay," Jack repeated. He glanced around. "It's getting dark anyway. We'll set up camp for the night, and tomorrow...we can go back through the gate and get the antihistamine. Whatever. We'll figure it out tomorrow. You can survive the night, can't you, Daniel?"  
  
Daniel nodded miserably and sniffled. Jack couldn't bear to look—it was far too depressing—and turned away quickly.  
  
"Right, you two," he started, looking at the newcomers. "Go with Teal'c to either find or make some adequate shelter. Carter, Daniel and I will--"  
  
Daniel sneezed.  
  
"Carter and I will--" Jack started over.  
  
"That sounds awfully depressing," a metallic, lugubrious, monotonous voice interrupted. Daniel yelped and tripped over his own pack. Carter and Jack swung their guns around immediately. Teal'c didn't even bother; he was too busy trying not to laugh, and since it was such an unusual occurrence, it was taking up all his concentration.  
  
Something clunked into view. A robot. What a real robot should look like, according to Jack at least who thought back to their far-too-perfect doubles; this one was all chunky metal and glowing red eyes and obviously not human. Its gait made an oddly depressing clunking sound, as if it were in need of a good oiling at its joins.  
  
"Marvin!" Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect chorused in surprise. Their faces instantly became dismayed.  
  
"Oh no," Ford went on alone, groaning. SG-1 looked between him and the newcomer, the newcomer and him, wondering who the hell was gonna show up next. Bugs Bunny? The Marx Brothers? "You guys don't happen to have any Ol' Janx Spirit on you, do you? 'Cos we're *really* gonna need some alcohol to deal with him."  
  
***  
  
It was Jack's turn to gnaw at the inside of his mouth angrily.  
  
"Marvin?" George said in disbelief. "The robot's name was *Marvin*?"  
  
Dr Jackson nodded weakly. "Marvin the Paranoid Android," he said, a hand surreptitiously sneaking across the table toward his tissues, feinting for a convenient folder when it thought someone was watching its movement too closely. "Apparently it—he—had traveled with the other two for a while at some point."  
  
"Apparently," Jack growled softly, "he was depressed. *Apparently* he had a pain in the diodes down his left side. *Apparently* he had a brain the size of a freakin' planet!"  
  
"Right," Carter agreed hastily, jumping in, her own aggravation forgotten in the face of Jack's supreme overriding annoyance. Daniel's hand was clutching at his tissues nervously, but he remained unaware of the act as he stared at Jack. "It repeated itself. A lot. Sir," she recollected herself with difficulty.  
  
"And it was depressed," Jack snarled. "Oh *God* was it depressed."  
  
"Did it pose any kind of threat?" Hammond jumped in, trying to distract his second in command. The colonel was twisting a pen he'd found near him in his hands.  
  
The pen broke into little pieces. "Only to my sanity," O'Neill stated in unnaturally calm tones. Daniel switched his focus to the pen and scooted his chair away slightly.  
  
George decided to get this briefing over with as quickly as possible. "You must have found shelter for the night after that," he said.  
  
"Not exactly," Daniel said, his hand releasing the now sadly-crumpled packet of Kleenexes. They slowly flattened themselves out of their own accord, almost to their natural shape, the plastic packaging crinkling discreetly in the near-silence. Jackson's attention was caught by the packet and he watched, fascinated.  
  
"We gave up on finding real shelter and just camped out for the night," Jack explained. He seemed to be back under control, except for the occasional tic in the side of his face or spasm of fingers over broken shards of pen.  
  
"And?" Hammond asked.  
  
***  
  
"Life. Don't talk to me about life."  
  
"Nobody *was* talking to you about life!"  
  
"You don't have to shout at me. I have highly acute hearing. Shouting only depresses me."  
  
"*Everything* depresses you!"  
  
Daniel sneezed explosively.  
  
"Don't *you* start," Jack groused at his teammate, tossing another stick into the large fire they'd built.  
  
"What'd I do?" Daniel asked plaintively, his voice a bit scratchy from all the sneezing and nose-blowing he'd been doing the past few hours. "Leave me out of this, Jack; I've got my own problems."  
  
Affronted, Jack stared at Daniel and thought about shooting him. Which just went to show how seriously annoyed he was by this freaking robot that *wouldn't shut up*. On the other side of the fire, Sam was having her own problems.  
  
"I know I'm irresistible, baby, but you really don't have to try to resist so hard," Zaphod was saying as he lay back on the ground casually.  
  
"You have no idea what I'm resisting," Sam bit out. Jack had a feeling her teeth would be completely worn down by the time she got away from these two.  
  
"As for that whole SETI project idea of yours, well that's a laugh..."  
  
Sam made a strangling noise. She'd given up responding to Ford about an hour ago.  
  
Meanwhile, Teal'c was smugly standing watch. He walked a perimeter around their fire, and occasionally turned to glance back at the others, and was smug. It was like a shadow, this smugness, which followed him on his patrol and stuck its tongue out at them and waggled its fingers in its ears. Cheeky bastard, acting like all this was just some great joke for his benefit. He was only adding to his teammates' severe irritation.  
  
"You travel through a wormhole that breaks you down to your constituent molecules and spits you back out on the other side?" Marvin was droning. "How very depressing. Not as depressing as spending nine million years waiting around in a parking lot, but still very depressing."  
  
"I don't *care* if it's depressing," Jack said through gritted teeth, the hand on his gun tightening its grip steadily. Perhaps if he slugged the robot with it, it'd leave a dent. At this point he would take any satisfaction he could get. "*You* are depressing!"  
  
"Thank you so much for pointing out something I already know. It only depresses me more. If that were even possible."  
  
"Would you just shut *up*?" Sam finally burst out at Ford Prefect. "I don't *care* if you think we're backwards, primitive cave people who've only gotten so far as E=mc squared! I don't *care* that you were stuck on our planet for fifteen years and hated it! It doesn't have anything to do with me! And in any case, I've been insulted by more highly intelligent species than you've had hot dinners!"  
  
"Now, now, I never said I hated your planet, I just said--"  
  
"And that was the second year running I was voted Coolest Hoopy Guy Around," Zaphod was saying airily.  
  
"And I think your fashion sense sucks!" Sam swung around to tell *him* off as well.  
  
There was a pause before Zaphod replied. "Hey, baby, no need to be snarky..."  
  
"Ha ha," said Teal'c's smugness. "Hahahaha!"  
  
"Trying to think down to your level is depressing."  
  
"You wanna know depressing? I'll give you depressing! I'll shove this damned gun down your damned eye socket if you don't damned well shut up; how's *that* for depressing?!"  
  
Daniel sniffed savagely.  
  
The others cut off whatever remarks they were about to make to stare at him blankly. He stared back at them miserably. "I'm going to bed," he told them nasally and crawled a little away from the fire to slip under a blanket, clutching at his much-depleted packet of tissues the way a small child would cling to a teddy bear after finding out his dog had just died.  
  
***  
  
Daniel sniffed again, glaring at Jack. "I'm not *that* pathetic," he said huffily.  
  
"You were, as O'Neill stated after insuring you had fallen asleep, 'adorable,'" Teal'c put in his two cents' worth with a barely contained smirk of glee. The linguist turned another outraged look upon the colonel. The colonel hastily turned back to the general.  
  
"He got us to shut up anyway," Jack said. "For the most part," he added. "Xylophone—"  
  
"Zaphod," Daniel said under his breath.  
  
"Yeah, whatever--was still putting the moves on Carter, though."  
  
"Why does every sleaze ball on every planet we come across think I'll fall all over him?" Sam was muttering to herself, turning a pen of her own over and over in her hand. "Just because I'm the *girl*--" She snapped her pen in two.  
  
Hammond made a mental note to place another requisition order for disposable pens while the others stared at the newly broken one, the men in fascination, the woman sheepishly.  
  
"Did the rest of the night pass without...incident, at least?" George brought their attention back to him and the briefing.  
  
"I guess you could say that," Jack snorted. Hammond looked at him steadily. "Er, sir," he added, abashed. His face cleared, his voice smoothed, as he continued his report. "Beeblebrox and Prefect wandered off a ways, taking a bottle out of the Ford guy's satchel. They then proceeded to get drunk and sing. Really, really drunk. Really, really weird songs. Loud, annoying, weird songs. Carter took the opportunity to get some sleep and some sanity back, and I took watch over for Teal'c so I could get away from that god-awful robot."  
  
"And then?" George asked encouragingly. They were settling down at last; he wanted to make use of it while it lasted.  
  
"Well," Jack said, rolling his neck and fidgeting with his hands, "it became morning. Sir."  
  
George closed his eyes briefly. "And then?" he asked, trying to keep the long-suffering sigh out of his voice.  
  
"Daniel fell in a pond."  
  
"Oh shut up, Jack."  
  
***  
  
"Breakfast!" Jack was hollering. "Rise and shine, up and at 'em, wake up and smell the coffee, campers; it's a beautiful day and we're getting the hell out of here."  
  
"Wha?" Daniel frowned, blinked, raised himself on one elbow and stared fuzzily up at the colonel who was looming over him like some vengeful god of early mornings who particularly disliked sleepy archaeologists with allergies. "Wha?" he repeated, as Jack's words slowly sank into his mind the way those sparkly little flakes sink in the water after you shake a snowglobe. Yes, even multiple PhDs become monosyllabic first thing after waking up. Especially those lucky multiple PhDs who speak multiple languages and are kinda fuzzy on if they should be speaking English or Hindi right now. "We're leaving? We just got--h-h-here..." he sneezed.  
  
"Bless you. I rest my case," Jack said and handed Daniel a mug of coffee. He might be a vengeful god, Daniel decided as he sipped at the scalding beverage and Jack wandered back to the others, and a jackass god with no sympathy whatsoever, but the multiple PhD would pray to him any day so long as he kept supplying the java.  
  
Zaphod and Ford had dark circles under their eyes and were in no condition to respectively seduce or annoy Sam, so she was relatively chipper. Marvin was his usual self, however, so Jack desperately escaped to scout out more of the area. Within an hour he came back and they were traipsing once again to the gate.  
  
"We didn't come this way earlier," Carter said presently.  
  
"Yes we did," Jack retorted.  
  
"No we didn't," Sam replied stubbornly. "Sir." Her subtle pause before adding the "sir" was positively scathing.  
  
"Yes we did," Jack repeated.  
  
"Sir, we did not pass a pond yesterday evening."  
  
"Wha?" Sam pointed, and Jack followed the direction of her finger. "Oh." He studied the area carefully, taking a step back and cocking his head to one side. The others were mildly surprised when he managed to refrain from sticking his thumb out in front of him to gauge perspective. "I wouldn't call that a pond, Captain. More of a...marsh."  
  
Daniel sniffed. Loudly. Jack glared at his friend. "No-one asked for *your* opinion," he pointed out.  
  
"The point is, sir," Sam said with remarkable restraint and patience, "we didn't come this way yesterday."  
  
"Oh. Right. I knew that, Carter."  
  
Sam sighed. Zaphod was eyeing her again, one head having woken up enough from its hung-over stupor to actually open its eyes to more than a squint (the other head was still snoring loudly). Ford was probably thinking about some deeply complex astrophysicist joke he could spring on her, judging by that awful gleam in his unblinking eyes. "Well, this is the first waterspot we've found on this planet, sir; it might be a good idea to get a sample or two to take back and have analyzed."   
  
"I suppose you're right, Captain. Go ahead."  
  
"Mind if I go with you, Sam?" Daniel asked. "I could do with a bit of a wash, at least for my face."  
  
Sam glanced at Jack, who nodded; she turned back to Daniel and smiled sympathetically. "Sure, Daniel," she said. "We'll be right back, sir."  
  
"Write when you get there," Jack called after them. The pond--marsh--was barely a klick off their track; the two scientists would be in sight at all times.   
  
He still should have known better.  
  
Jack and Teal'c watched the two companions quickly stride across to the marsh, Daniel perhaps a little clumsier and slower than usual. They both knelt down, Sam to get her samples, Daniel to wash his face. Bored, Jack glanced away and checked up on his and Teal'c's companions. He made especially sure to glare at Marvin, who was exuding despair.  
  
"Woah--woah--oh sh--!"  
  
"Daniel!"  
  
There was a loud splash.  
  
Jack closed his eyes. "Don't tell me, Teal'c. Please don't tell me."  
  
"I am afraid Daniel Jackson appears to have fallen into the pond, O'Neill."  
  
"I said don't tell me." Jack still hadn't opened his eyes.  
  
"I did not take you seriously."  
  
Jack opened his eyes to glare at Teal'c before turning back to the pond. "Carter!" he shouted. "Is Daniel alright?"  
  
Daniel scrambled out of the water, ignoring Sam's hands which were trying to help him. "He's fine, sir!" she yelled without looking back at her CO, ducking back and throwing her hands up in front of her face to protect it from the cold marsh water Daniel was frantically trying to shake off. She yelled at him, he swore back in aggravation, and finally he stopped pretending to be a wet dog and just stood there, breathing heavily, looking put out and sopping. The others remained where they were, watching. A moment later, after Sam quietly asked if he were ready and Daniel nodded, they both trudged back to the rest of the group.  
  
"Daniel?" Jack tried to look at his friend with only understanding and sympathy in his eyes, but the linguist was absolutely soaked, hair hanging over his glasses like unhappy seaweed and shoes squishing with a sound that was entirely unlike yet almost as depressing as Marvin's voice, and Jack was having a hard time keeping a straight face.  
  
"My balance is off," Daniel muttered, taking off his glasses to wipe at them ineffectually on his soggy jacket and shirt. "Damned allergies..." he added in a grumble and sneezed. He closed his eyes and counted to ten, having to stop at seven for another sneeze.  
  
Jack reached out to pat him on the back of his shoulder, then thought better of it when the gesture was only halfway there, so that his hand hovered without touching. "It's alright, Daniel," he said as soothingly as possible. "We're almost home."  
  
Daniel sighed long-sufferingly, nodded, groaned when he realized his few remaining tissues were wet, and started traipsing dejectedly for the gate. The others, including Ford and Zaphod, glanced at each other and mutually agreed laughing right now would not be a good idea.  
  
"I think his life must be almost as depressing as mine," Marvin remarked. Jack nodded sadly, thinking that maybe the robot wasn't quite such an egocentric bastard as he had previously thought.  
  
They all followed after Daniel.  
  
***  
  
"And that's when you came back?" Hammond asked, frowning. "What happened to the others?"  
  
"Oh no," Jack waved his hand extravagantly in the general's general direction. "*Oh* no. We're not finished yet."  
  
"What? More happened then?"   
  
"And I wasn't that pathetic," Daniel added in a mutter.  
  
"No, Daniel," Jack said with sweet sympathy. "You only fell in a pond."  
  
"Marsh," the linguist quickly retorted.  
  
"I know! I'm the one who corrected Carter!"  
  
"I didn't need to be corrected!" Carter responded heatedly. "I had a lot on my mind if you hadn't noticed! Sir!"  
  
Teal'c sat back to watch, serene once more. There might have been a discrete giggle from his smugness, however.  
  
"Enough!" George said, and the three team members immediately silenced. "You were getting back to the gate. Were you seriously lost? What else happened on that damn blasted planet?"  
  
"Uh..." O'Neill glanced quickly at Jackson, as if assessing the archaeologist's mood. The archaeologist resolutely refused to look up and meet his gaze as he was far too busy compulsively tearing Kleenexes up into little strips. George had a sinking feeling about the whole matter. "Well, sir, somebody else showed up..."  
  
***  
  
They were arguing again. Ford had been unable to stop himself from pointing out a few other things human astrophysicists had been getting wrong for a while, touching upon wormholes among other topics, which had only set Sam off, and Zaphod had told her seriously that all that science-speak was just too damned sexy for words and that she kinda reminded him of his old friend Trillian. Marvin had started telling Jack his life story, which had depressed Jack very much. Daniel squelched and began to smell like marsh as his clothes became less thoroughly wet and only--damp, and he started to mutter various curses in various languages under his breath as he walked, a new curse with each squishing step. Jack wasn't sure what all those words meant, but he did have to give Daniel points for creativity and perseverance.  
  
They finally reached the Stargate.  
  
"Thank God," Jack groaned. "Right, Carter, quick, dial us up and get us out of here."  
  
"Sir?" Sam didn't move, a hand on her gun. "What about them?" she jerked her head at Zaphod and Ford and Marvin.  
  
Jack turned to face them and was about to speak when he heard something. "Shh," he said sharply, pivoting around in an attempt to pinpoint the source of the noise.  
  
"There," Teal'c pointed upwards. The others followed the direction of his finger.  
  
A spaceship was hovering, very smoothly, very quietly, with just the barest discreet hum of power--that was the noise he'd heard, Jack realized. The spaceship was unlike anything he had ever seen.  
  
"Teal'c," he said, "have you...?"  
  
"No, O'Neill," Teal'c replied. "I have never seen such a craft."  
  
They waited, only a violent sneeze from Daniel and a laconic "Bless…" from Jack to break the expectant silence.  
  
The spaceship landed efficiently at the very edge of the clearing in which they all stood, so gently it barely raised a whisper of a wind to grab at the group's hair or shove some leaves out of the way.   
  
"I know that ship," Zaphod suddenly mumbled to himself while his other head squinted at the newly arrived ship. Ford was nodding in agreement thoughtfully.  
  
They waited another moment as a ramp discreetly came down from the ship, and then a tall alien strode toward the group purposefully. He was thin with pearly grey-green skin that shone with a sheen that they had a feeling required extremely expensive soap to keep up and which other such green-skinned aliens would probably kill to have.  
  
"Hey, it is him!" Zaphod and Ford chorused, turning to each other and grinning, pleased with themselves. They looked at the others. "Guys, this is--"  
  
"You!" Sam gasped, staring at the alien as he stopped in front of them.  
  
"What?" Ford said, staring at Sam. "You know him? How the hell d'you know him? It's not like he's bloody Martin Smith from Croydon!"  
  
"Daniel Jackson?" the alien snapped, ignoring the others completely. He appeared to be carrying some type of alien clipboard.  
  
Daniel stepped forward nervously. "That's me," he said. He raised his hand a little and waved it weakly. He sniffled but held back a sneeze, just in case. He didn't want to offend, after all.  
  
"Doctor Daniel Jackson?" the alien repeated, just to confirm. Daniel nodded. The alien nodded himself and marked something off on his clipboard. He looked up again and leant in toward the linguist.  
  
"You're a twat, Jackson," the alien told Daniel confidentially. "A right git. I just thought you should know that. And you really ought to change those clothes. Have a nice day."  
  
He pivoted on one long, thin, green leg and walked back to his ramp. A moment after he was aboard, the door smoothly and quietly raised, and the ship smoothly and quietly lifted into the air, disappearing discreetly off the planet.  
  
"Bastard!" Sam yelled after his ship. "D'you have any idea what you did when you showed up the day before I had to defend my thesis? I almost lost it completely!"  
  
Daniel seemed stunned, incapable of reacting at all bar the occasional blink. "That's it!" Jack suddenly snapped, all semblance of patience lost at this latest ridiculous piece of business. "We're out of here. Carter, get dialing. You!" he swung around to point his gun at the cousins and robot. "Don't even *think* about following us! And if I find out any of you ever came back to Earth, I will hunt you down and shoot you myself!" His voice was coming dangerously close to a screech. "I've had enough of this insanity!" He turned when he heard the explosive sound of the event horizon of a wormhole forcing itself through a superconducting ring of naquadah and into their version of reality. "Go!" he yelled at Teal'c and Sam. He snagged Daniel's elbow and dragged him along. He didn't turn to look back at the three…people…he was leaving behind.  
  
***  
  
There was a moment of thoughtful silence.  
  
"So they're probably still there?" Hammond asked.  
  
"I don't care if they are!" Jack hollered.  
  
"Sir," Daniel added obligingly for the colonel. Jack blinked at him, shaken momentarily out of his vast irritation, before gathering himself together again and dragging his attention back to the general.  
  
"They were insane! Sir! Surely you can see that?"  
  
George rubbed at his left temple. "Quite, Colonel. Quite." He looked around at each of the teammates. "This was certainly an unusual mission, even for you." Sam nodded, breathing deeply and probably trying to avoid flashbacks to a chance meeting with an insulting alien over ten years ago; Daniel held back a sneeze; Jack looked like he was thinking about finding another pen to disembowel. Teal'c merely looked content, while his smugness waved merrily at the airman standing in the corner of the room. "However, I would like to point out that none of you were injured--"  
  
"Except for our sanity," Jack muttered.  
  
"--which was already pretty damaged anyway..." Daniel admitted with a thoughtful crease of eyebrows and forehead. Jack considered and had to agree.  
  
"--and you refrained from somehow putting our planet in danger once again," the general went on, ignoring them because sometimes it was the only way to deal with them and carry on with business. "It was unusual but at least nothing fundamentally awful happened for once. You're all on stand-down until your next mission briefing, two days from now. Go home, people, and...relax. Please."  
  
"Yessir," three voices chorused, while another, deeper voice added, "Indeed, General Hammond." The four teammates stood up, gathering folders, papers, broken pens, and used tissues. They left the room.  
  
George sat back in his chair, staring thoughtfully at the wall opposite. He waited until he was absolutely sure all four of them were out of earshot. And then he started laughing his ass off.  
  
***  
  
Meanwhile, back on the planet, Ford and Zaphod looked at each other thoughtfully. Marvin was staring off into the distance, thinking depressing thoughts.  
  
"Now what do we do?" Ford asked.  
  
Zaphod shrugged. "Try flagging down a ship again," he suggested.  
  
Ford nodded. "Pity," he remarked. "I rather liked them."  
  
"Yeah," his semi-cousin replied. "And the girl was absolutely dying for me."  
  
"Yeah," Ford agreed, nodding once more. "Ah well." He barely gave Marvin a glance as he and Zaphod headed away from the Stargate. "C'mon, robot," he called over his shoulder. "We've got better things to do than wait around for that thing to go off again."  
  
With a chunky metal robot clunking depressingly behind them, the two men from Betelguese V wandered off deeper into the planet. 


End file.
